Previously, he covered breaking news for NPR, where he covered everything from natural disasters to the national debates on policing and immigration.

Peralta joined NPR in 2008 as an associate producer. Previously, he worked as a features reporter for the Houston Chronicle and a pop music critic for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, FL.

Through his journalism career, he has reported from more than a dozen countries and he was part of the NPR teams awarded the George Foster Peabody in 2009 and 2014. His 2016 investigative feature on the death of Philando Castile was honored by the National Association of Black Journalists and the Society for News Design.

Peralta was born amid a civil war in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. His parents fled when he was a kid, and the family settled in Miami. He's a graduate of Florida International University.

Parishioners at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Goma line up behind buckets to douse their hands with a solution of bleach and water. Then they get in another line where a team of health care workers check their temperature with an infrared thermometer.

The bells from the church tower toll. Girls run around in formal dresses. They flit around posters warning of Ebola symptoms, as the health workers look out at them from behind protective goggles.

As you walk into Ibiza, a dance club in the middle of Goma, the bouncer takes your temperature, and you have to wash your hands with a bleach and water solution. Then you walk past a little gazebo and into the strobe lights, and you're welcomed by a black-and-white portrait of the late, great rumba musician Papa Wemba.The band, its members dressed in matching silk shirts, is already setting up.

A civil disobedience campaign in Sudan has brought the country's capital to a standstill, closing down restaurants, banks and other businesses and turning streets desolate on Sunday, the latest escalation by protesters demanding an end to military rule.

Researchers for the human rights group investigated five U.S. airstrikes and found that they had resulted in 14 civilian deaths. The U.S. has "indiscriminately killed some of these civilians," Abdullahi Hassan, a Nairobi-based researcher for Amnesty, said in an interview.

In person, Jawar Mohammed is quieter, smaller than the big persona he has built online.

To see him, you arrive at what looks like an old embassy residence in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. It's hulking and white, multiple stories, surrounded by tall walls. You're frisked by plainclothes security officials and then guided through a series of empty rooms, one covered in Oriental rugs. Finally, you reach his small office, where he is sipping tea, monitoring his phones and keeping up with the latest political action on his laptop.

Almost everywhere you go in Zalambessa, a town on Ethiopia's border with Eritrea, there are reminders of war: buildings in rubble, walls riddled with bullet holes and a border still delineated by two rows of trenches.

But now, dramatic change is underway. Many of the troops have pulled out. A little cafe has popped up right on the border. Children are selling candies and drinks to travelers and, for the first time in two decades, people and goods are transiting the crossing between Zalambessa and the Eritrean town of Serha.

As the sun comes up, the white stone on the Holy Trinity Cathedral turns golden.

The church, in Ethiopia's capital, is intimately tied to the country's history. Many national heroes are buried in its gardens. The throne of last emperor, Haile Selassie, is still right next to the altar, and his and the empress's remains are said to be buried here.

Our international correspondents often find themselves in unusual situations - sometimes, even at home. NPR's East Africa correspondent, Eyder Peralta, sends us this reporter's notebook on the spitting cobra in his backyard.

Tens of thousands of South Sudanese cheered, paraded and danced around the grounds of the John Garang Memorial Park in the capital city ofJuba last week, celebrating a fresh peace deal. It was a striking change of mood for a country that has seen little joy in the past five years, ripped apart by a civil war that has displaced millions and left hundreds of thousands dead.

The Standard Gauge Railway station in Nairobi is easily the most impressive public building in Kenya.

While a lot of Kenyan government buildings are drab and functional and date back to colonial days, this station is adventurous. It's all gray and modern. Geometric shapes form an abstract locomotive, and red neon announces the "Nairobi Terminus."

Even in the middle of the day, in middle of the week, the theater was completely packed.

Hundreds had come to watch Rafiki, a movie about two young Kenyan women who are full of life, joy and wonder. Kena is a great student; she plays football and hangs out with the guys. And Ziki is the free spirit — cotton candy dreads and a smile full of mischief.

Robert Mugabe sat on a green office chair. He wore sunglasses, and he looked small placed at the center of a gazebo in the middle of his huge estate in one of Harare's wealthiest suburbs.

Behind him, there was a pond, and down a sloping hill, his mansion — a sprawling multistory house flanked by granite lions and topped with blue, Chinese-inspired tiles that give it its name — "the Blue Roof."

For 37 years, Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist. But the mansion is where he spends most of his time now, since the military pressured him to resign in November.

At home in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, Frehiwot Negash was watching history unfold on television.

She watched Sunday as Abiy Ahmed, the young reformist prime minister of Ethiopia, stepped off a plane and hugged the longtime ruler of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, waiting on the tarmac in Eritrea's capital.

One of the first things that you notice upon landing in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is how clean it is. The city has become a shining example of positive urban transformation. But there is also a dark side, as NPR's Eyder Peralta reports.

Here in the United States, cars and industry are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. In Africa, it's different. There, it's agriculture and a lot of it is cows. NPR's Eyder Peralta visited a lab trying to understand cow emissions.

Preparing for a controversial referendum, the central African country of Burundi is on edge.

The Thursday referendum would not only extend the rule of President Pierre Nkurunziza until 2034, but it would also roll back some key aspects of the Arusha Agreement, which paved the way for ending the country's long and bloody civil war in 2005. The fear is that the referendum could spark more violence in the country.

Our series "Take A Number" looks at problems around the world — and the people trying to solve them — through the lens of a single number.

From the boat, Rebecca Kochulem points at the hills surrounding Lake Baringo. It is a spectacular specimen of natural beauty: red cliffs plunging into water, steam rising from gurgling hot springs and the hills, lush and green with acacia trees.